What is Sociology?

Individuality and independence are highly valued in our society. It is sometimes easy to forget that everything we do, including our private thoughts and fantasies, is shaped through our interactions with others. Whether we like it or not we are born into groups and spend most of our social lives in those same groups. All of us assimilate, at least in part, the perspectives of these groups and thereby acquire our knowledge, language, values, attitudes, beliefs and sense of identity. As a discipline, Sociology involves the description and explanation of social structures, processes, and relations. These range from two-person interactions to relations between large social institutions, such as politics and the economy, to relations between nations. Sociology also ranges across time and serves as a useful complement to history. Changes in the social arrangements that people create are of special interest to the sociologist, for a number of reasons. For example, Sociology increases our understanding of ourselves and our society by providing us with concepts that describe and explain our social creations and how they influence us. We learn who we are and why, and how we are similar to and different from people with different social arrangements. In addition, exposure to Sociology opens our minds, prompts us to review the taken-for-granted, and encourages us to entertain alternatives. Finally, it is important to be aware that the organization and institutions of our society evolved through social processes operating in a social environment. We need to learn how to collect and analyze representative information about society and its members rather than to rely on information we encounter haphazardly. Sociology helps us move beyond common sense to describe and explain more accurately the categories of social behavior and the relations between them.

Goals for the Sociology Program at Miami University include:

(1) To understand the discipline of sociology and its role in contributing to our understanding of social reality.

(2) To understand the role of theory in sociology.

(3) To understand the roles of quantitative and qualitative methods in sociology.

(4) To understand basic concepts in sociology and their theoretical connections.

(5) To understand the roles of culture and social structure.

(6) To understand the reciprocal relationships between individual and society.

(7) To understand both macro sociology and micro sociology.

(8) To think critically.

(9) To understand the effects of social inequality.